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Opera Mini (and for that matter, BitStream BOLT) is a J2ME client for an Internet service. This service involves a server that runs a web browser. For Opera Mini, the server runs a customized copy of Presto. For BitStream BOLT, customized WebKit. The web browser on the server sends back specialized markup and data in a "partially rendered" format - doing a lot of the rendering on the service server, but yet returning rich data back to the client, as opposed to a big image file with a clickmap, Things like complex CSS rules might be render to the client as markup saying, "draw a blue box from 35,15 to 100,85". Text is sent to allow for reflowability.

Firefox for J2ME would mean Mozilla would have to run a server containing a specialized Gecko renderer that outputs a simplified form of the page as simple markup, plus a J2ME client that would finish rendering from the simplified output. Great concept but too many problems.

Firefox for J2ME would mean Mozilla would have to run a server containing a specialized Gecko renderer that outputs a simplified form of the page as simple markup, plus a J2ME client that would finish rendering from the simplified output. Great concept but too many problems.

How do you figure that? There is nothing saying that you have to do it the way Opera Mini et al are doing it. Of course you can implement a complete web browser in J2ME (it might however not be practical depending on the specifications of the target devices).

They already did port it and it's not so great.
See http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/platforms/ [mozilla.com] at the bottom. Builds of Firefox Mobile exist for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and are only intended as developer "emulators", even though they're essentially true ports.

But that, generally (especially when looking at huge delays in releasing "proper" Mozilla for mobile phones; essentially directly justified by "we'll just wait until the phones get faster"; while other, also "proper" browsers were doing it) seems somehow at odds with stated Mozilla goals, "to preserve choice and innovation on the Web" - suddenly it's "unless on a too slow device"?

iWould running such servers really be that big of a problem with their financials? Mozilla isn't the only more or less independen

That's circular; "we are pragmatic about not fullfiling our mission on the fastest growing type of web access because we made our browser in a way which makes it impossible" (nvm the proxy approach; though how the codebase runs would probably influence proxy headaches, too)

The actual J2ME client software running on the handset is not Opera the web browser because it is not actually a web browser (instead, it is more like a display renderer for a web browser running on a remote server), nor does it contain Presto (which is instead ran on a remote server.)

Symbian could be nice, but it seems like targeting MeeGo would be a better bet, especially as they already have a Maemo version done and MeeGo is the heir apparent for Symbian.

Actually, now that I think about it, I believe that when the MeeGo Notebook UX was released the devs chose Fennec as the browser, so maybe there's not much work left to do there.

Having Firefox on Symbian (e.g. on the next Nokia N8 phone, etc...) would also hitch Firefox to the transition wagon that Nokia is driving to try to get Symbian developers and hardware integrators to eventually move to MeeGo. There could be some benefit to be had there...

Symbian could be nice, but it seems like targeting MeeGo would be a better bet, especially as they already have a Maemo version done and MeeGo is the heir apparent for Symbian.

The real question is why bother to bring out a version for Maemo when Maemo is an evolutionary dead end, that will have no future versions? MeeGo is the replacement for Maemo! Typical Mozilla timing... well behind where it needs to be. I was playing with beta of a mobile firefox on Windows Mobile 2003. It more or less worked. AFAICT all that work was simply discarded in favor of a new project? Would very much like to be told I am wrong with specifics.

The real question is how did you manage to miss that MeeGo is essentially not a replacement, but rebranding? (and hardware of mobile phones supposedly wasn't there yet, in 2003)

Uh, what? Almost everything is totally different in MeeGo. I mean, it's going from GTK+ to Qt, for starters. Or how about the fact that it's based on Moblin, not on Maemo? I was following the Moblin releases when they suddenly became MeeGo and went from having to not having a GUI on x86.

MeeGo is absolutely a replacement for Maemo. And your Maemo software won't run on it. And Maemo was NEVER fully opened, but MeeGo is supposed to be, and Moblin was.

MeeGo for Handsets is actually based heavily on Maemo. From our point of view at least, it's an incremental change rather than a complete replacement. Firefox for MeeGo will be an evolution of Firefox for Maemo. Of course, it helps that the bulk of Firefox code is already platform- and toolkit-agnostic - for example, we already have Qt builds for Maemo 5 [mozilla.org].

Symbian could be nice, but it seems like targeting MeeGo would be a better bet, especially as they already have a Maemo version done and MeeGo is the heir apparent for Symbian.

The real question is why bother to bring out a version for Maemo when Maemo is an evolutionary dead end, that will have no future versions? MeeGo is the replacement for Maemo! Typical Mozilla timing... well behind where it needs to be.

99% of Firefox Mobile development is platform-agnostic. You can flip a switch at compile time and it builds against GTK or Qt, and/or on Maemo/Meego or Android.

The only 'focus' on Maemo might be that there is a current userbase there, so it's cool to have official updates for them.

Wait, what? Firefox runs just fine in its full form on my Eee PC, that's clocked in at somewhat less than 1 GHZ. The only issue I could see is that the full version takes up too much memory for a cell phone and the interface doesn't really work on a screen of that size. But that's the case with all the other browsers except IE, which really doesn't run well on anything that slow.

Firefox was release a few days ago on the N900. The user interface is indeed nice, very intuitive too, however the browser is still quite slow. If you enable flash (through about:config) it hangs the interface for long periods of time, particularly with video playback it stutters constantly - probably flash 10.1 will sort this out whenever they feel like releasing it - my understanding is that this version of flash will have hardware acceleration.

All in all it's nice, I would love to use it as my default browser, though the interface is a little unresponsive at the moment. Chromium suffers the same problem in a way.

It takes 5 seconds from "click" to the first screen, and another 6-7 before I can type and start. Going to "www.youtube.com" took 5 seconds from hitting enter to the page fully loaded. Flash is enabled with the "YouTube enabler" plugin. I picked a video at random and played it twice. Once in the window, another time full screen. 5-6 seconds for the page to load and get the little spinner in the flash box. The video played with one small hiccup, about 20 se

The improvement over MicroB is that it works better for actually buying things on-line. The "save as PDF" option for receipts is a very useful feature. What's needed now is a print driver; discussions I've looked at suggest that this won't come before MeeGo, as there is little point in Nokia developing a CUPS-friendly print solution for an OS that it plans to obsolete.

I've installed it on my n900, but it's unusably slow, especially compared to MicroB, which is the default browser on Maemo (which also uses the gecko engine). It takes ages to start up, uses up all the CPU, and it takes 5 minutes before you finally managed to load a page. Also, after you close the browser, there's a 'fennec' process still using all the CPU cycles and draining your battery.

Too bad, because I do like its feature set: Firefox sync, addons, etc, but I'll stick to MicroB until they find a solution to the CPU use issue.

Load time is definitely an issue on Maemo. The built-in MicroB browser uses "faststart" which means that it starts a process when the device starts up, and that process stays in memory even after you close the browser. Firefox 1.1 doesn't use faststart, but we and Nokia are working on it for version 2 [mozilla.org] which will be the default MeeGo browser.

The "fennec" process running after you close the window is a bug, and one that I don't think we've seen before.

The fennec process lingering happens only sometimes, I think it has to do with whether I'm running other apps, and because i closed it because it appeared to be hanging. I'll try to find a way to reliably reproduce it and file a bug when I do.

Luckily the phone gets pretty hot when fennec doesn't close properly, so I know something's up when it happens:p .

I can't believe they still haven't fixed zoom. There are only 2 options "zoomed in" and "zoomed out", there is no in-between. There is no clockwise/counter-clockwise gesture to adjust zoom level like in MicroB. Uninstalled.

It is unfortunate but I think Mozilla is way too late jumping on this mobile browser bandwagon. People are already way too comfortable and probably aren't going to be switching browsers anytime soon unless new phones come preinstalled with Firefox mobile. And I don't see anybody doing that considering that Apple is sticking with Safari, and the Android is using their own Chrome blend. Frankly it's useless. I've never been an Apple fan, but damn that Safari for the iPod touch and iPhone is probably one of th

I didn't, however, like the browser. The inability to open new taps was the killer for me, for all its rendering speed.

I used Opera Mini on my 5800, and was pleased that it did tabbed browsing, but it just wasn't that good for form filling. I get a lot of trains, and cannot always be sure of my connections before setting off, so a phone that allows me to search for onwards trains as I'm nearing a stop is what I need. Opera mini did not allow that. With all their stuff b

Considering Opera Mini is a J2ME app and the N900 has no J2ME runtime, and the only way to run it is with MicroEmulator, I'm not surprised that it looked bad. I'm surprised you managed to get it running at all after 1 day of owning the N900.
There is, however, Opera Mobile for N900:
http://labs.opera.com/news/2010/05/11/ [opera.com]